Wherein Mass Effect 2 is Spoiled
I'm going to be petty here. It would be highly disingenuous for me to suggest otherwise.
I loved ME2. I don't mind that not a whole lot actually happened plotwise; it's the middle of a trilogy, and I accept that that implies Two Towers syndrome. I just don't like that Shelob turned out to be the Terminator.
Part of the reason-much of the reason-that I love Mass Effect is the universe. It's good, solid science fiction. It has that sort of Vernor Vinge feel, wherein physics is religiously obeyed outside of one single piece of Handwavium; and Handwavium is milked for all its logical consequences. Element Zero and its applications are extremely well thought out, and make for a compelling universe.
So too with the Reapers and the Protheans in the first game. The big reveals were excellent, well timed, and delivered fantastically. Sovereign was a fantastic villain whose Lovecraftian beyond-ness was well conveyed. The pathos of the Prothean tragedy was palpable. I didn't even mind that the motives of the Reapers were left vague.
(As a sidebar, I assumed that the Reapers interest in the extinction cycle was twofold; to allow sapient organic life time to stockpile element zero, but to prevent it from doing the one thing that could threaten the Reapers-building AI's. The Reapers themselves surely evolved from an organic-built AI that attained sentience, like the Geth. The entire mass relay system makes perfect sense this way.)
In ME2, our new Reaper-of-the-week is nowhere near as ominous as Sovereign. Sovereign doesn't say a damned thing until two-thirds of the way in, and then it's brief, to the point, and eldritch. Harbinger has combat taunts. (I can understand why he does; if he doesn't talk when he's possessing Collectors, the player might assume that turning yellow and growing shields is just something Collectors do normally.) He doesn't come off as ominous, instead he has the bizarre logorrhea you would expect to see in a Turian merc that clipped inside a wall in the first game. "Yes, yes, enemies everywhere. Please shut up." Battle Tourette's, if you will.
If anything, the biggest issue with Harbinger is that the simple act of acknowledging an individual human as worthy of individual attention undermines the godlike detachment of the Reapers.
Well, alright. My emotional involvement is reduced slightly, but nothing major. Even I can bow to the realities of gameplay mechanics and of holding the player's hand through the narrative. Few villains are as cool as Sovereign, and it would be unrealistic to expect Harbinger to live up to that standard.
(I won't address the Collectors being Prothean. I realized it as soon as I hit a side-quest with a Prothean beacon that replayed the Prothean-flashback cutscenes from the first game. All the dying Protheans look like Collectors. Realization, headslap. I spent the next twenty hours of gameplay waiting around for the game to get around to telling me. I've no business judging a reveal I didn't really experience properly. It makes good solid sense to me, though, and I like it.)
The real problem, the big thing that prompted me to write this, is of course the Terminator. What the fuck? Why liquefy humans and build papier-mâché effigies out of them? What could the purpose possibly be? I can see harvesting the minds or the genes to provide some sort of basis for mental diversity amongst Reapers, but why the Hell would you build a giant fucking three-eyed dude? Why does it need fingers? Are you going to build it a navel?
Or if you just wanted to build a giant metal dude, why did you feel compelled to make it out of actual humans? Wouldn't iron be a more efficient building material? I don't know if you've ever tried to make a Voltron lion out of frappéd housecats, but let me tell you-it's not fucking worth it.
It's asinine, it doesn't make any sense, and when you were expecting something epic, it's just...
There's an episode of the Superfriends I'm reminded of. Toyman builds a planet at the center of a black hole. Builds the whole fucking thing. He covers it with a population of millions of toys, and lures the Superfriends there. Seriously, they fly into a black hole, where they fight endless legions of sentient toys.
Why does Toyman do this? To provide a distraction while he robs a bank.